NY TIMES | “4 Months” & “Ratatouille” for Scott, “Blood” & “Zodiac” for Dargis as Best of ’07

NY TIMES | "4 Months" & "Ratatouille" for Scott, "Blood" & "Zodiac" for Dargis as Best of '07

“Everyone knows that this is an arbitrary and subjective exercise — that’s part of the fun of it — but this year I’ve found it especially difficult to commit to so narrow and exclusive a list,” notes New York Timescritic A.O. Scott in declaring Cristian Mungiu‘s “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” and Brad Bird‘s “Ratatouille” the top two films of the year. Meanwhile, colleague Manohla Dargis said, “Top 10 lists are artificial exercises, assertions of critical ego, capricious and necessarily imperfect…More than anything they are a public ritual, which is their most valuable function.” She picked Paul Thomas Anderson‘s “There Will Be Blood,” and David Fincher‘s “Zodiac” as her top films. She noted, “These aren’t necessarily the year’s best (impossible to determine given the glut of films), just the two that matter most to me, that dug in the deepest and rearranged my own givens…I’m still intact (more or less), but these films shook up my world in the best possible way.”